INTRODUCTION When we gathered people together for two invitational
conferences on "Revisiting the 'North American Berdache Empirically and
Theoretically," our aim was to create a dialogue between indigenous/Native
people and academics who had written about them. The conferences, funded
by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, provided the
start of collaborative work that took place over the course of five years
and resulted in publication of our edited book, Two-Spirit People: Native
American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. One of the most
important outcomes of the five-year conversation among participants was
the realization that the term berdache was no longer acceptable as a catch-all
for Native American (indigenous peoples of the United States of America)
and First Nations (indigenous peoples of Canada) gender and sexual behaviors.
The Native participants concluded that the term was insulting and part
of the colonial discourse that continues to be used by select scholars
who appropriate indigenous people's lives in various ways. Native people
were talking about this issue long before non-Native academics noticed.

The most active resistance to using berdache for sexual and gender diversity
in North American aboriginal communities occurred at the Third Annual Native
American Gay and Lesbian Gathering, where attendees decided to change the
name of their future gatherings to The International Two-Spirit Gathering.
At the center of our investigation into the terms we use is a shared determination
to reintegrate the word berdache into our respective writings, but using
it clearly and precisely in its original meaning: "kept boy" or "male prostitute."(FN2)
In this paper, we explain our rationale for integrating the use of berdache
into our writings about two-spirit people, explore how the self-naming
and academic research issues can be accommodated collaboratively, and draw
some conclusions about past and future research into Native American sexualities
and gender diversity.

REDEFINING BERDACHE WITHIN THE CONTEMPORARY TWO-SPIRIT MOVEMENTTHE
CONTEMPORARY TWO-SPIRIT MOVEMENTThe two-spirit movement in the United States grew out of the Native
American Gay and Lesbian movement, which held its first international gathering
in Minneapolis in 1988. In Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the summer of 1990, those
who attended the third annual gathering focused on finding a new term for
Native sexualities and gender diversity. After considerable discussion,
the term two-spirit was chosen, which refers to a wide variety of Native
American and First Nations roles and identities past and present. The term
is not intended to mark a new category of gender. Instead two-spirit is
an indigenously defined pan-Native North American term that bridges Native
concepts of gender diversity and sexualities with those of Western cultures.
Two-spirit roles and identities are also referred to as gay, lesbian, transvestite,
transsexual, transgender, drag queens, and butches,(FN3) as well as winkte,
nádleeh, and other appropriate tribal terms. This interesting synchrony
helps to solve some self-identity problems that Native Americans and First
Nations two-spirit people have faced,(FN4) thus allowing those who live
in both urban and rural areas, but not necessarily on reservations, the
opportunity to use only one unambiguous term--two-spirit--for their gender
identity.

The word two-spirit will not work in all areas. It is suited more to
Natives who live in large multiethnic urban environments; those who live
in rural or reservation areas have their own terms to identify non-heterosexual
people in their communities. Two-spirit is a cultural and social Native
term, not a religious one. Some traditional people will not utilize the
term two-spirit to refer to anything associated with religious spiritual
events. The term spirit has a different meaning than is intended by this
label, and furthermore the meaning varies from tribe to tribe. A person
who identifies as two-spirit off the reservation will not necessarily be
seen or identified as a two-spirit person at home (on the reservation),
but will be identified by the term that is used within the community.(FN5)
However, with the increasing disappearance of Native languages today, that
term could be gay, lesbian, homosexual, and so forth, which is not surprising,
since English is the lingua franca in the pan-Indian world of the 1990s.

REVISITING AND REDEFINING BERDACHE Anthropologists and
others have used berdache as a catch-all phrase for homosexuality, hermaphrodism,
transvestitism (ceremonial as well as in daily wear), and transgenderism,
as well as for notions of gender diversity encoded in multiple gender systems
found within Native American and First Nations cultures since the 1500s.(FN6)
It is still used in this way by some old-fashioned scholars.(FN7) Trexler's
thoroughly documented work in this area also discusses incidences of "the
religious berdache," whose behaviors included instances of religious pederasty
in addition to priestly transvestic sexual performance by male priests
whose "... 'clothes they assumed wore were the skin of a woman ... a sacrificed
woman's flayed skin to replicate visually an Aztec goddess."(FN8) In no
instance does Trexler note a female-bodied person referred to as a berdache.
The first person to deal directly with Native North American "female berdaches"
was Blackwood.(FN9) In her thesis, she says.

Kroeber(FN10) and most other observers defined berdache as men who adopted
women's dress, work and status. Although there were a number of women who
adopted the male role, the term is associated with the male berdache....
The confusion surrounding the use of the term, as well as its etymology,
prompted the adoption in this work of the term cross-gender for the female
role, first used by Carrier(FN11) for both the male and female role.(FN12).

Detailed historiographies of the term berdache are contained in the
pre-1990 writings by Jacobs,(FN13) Callender and Kochems,(FN14) Williams,(FN15)
and gay American Indians.(FN16) The earliest published use of the term
appears in the Jesuit Relations,(FN17) where Jesuit priests condemned such
individuals.(FN18) Williams summarizes the etymology of the word as follows:.

The word originally came from the Persian bardaj barah , and via the
Arabs bardaj spread to the Italian language as bardasso berdasia , and
to the Spanish as bardaxa or bardaje bardaja by the beginning of the sixteenth
century. About the same time the word appeared in French as bardache...
and refers to the passive homosexual partner(FN19) (alternative spellings
from Jacobs(FN20) and elsewhere have been inserted in brackets).

The term has also been translated as "kept boy" or "male prostitute."(FN21)
The Oxford English Dictionary cross-references "berdache" to "catamite,"
which is translated as "a boy kept for unnatural purposes." With this etymology,
it should come as no surprise that some contemporary Native Americans and
First Nations people have come to consider the term berdache derogatory
and insulting to the image and identity of gay, lesbian, transgender, and
other two-spirit people.

The French term bardache gets transliterated to berdache by later writers
who enter it into the anthropological literature. There are also instances
of the word being spelled as follows: broadashe, bundosh and bowdash, berdach,
berdash, bredache, bredaches, bardash, berdêches, bird-ash, birdashes,
bradaje, among others (this list comes largely from Will Roscoe's 1993
compilation "Frontier Terms for Two-Spirits";(FN22) see also Williams,(FN23)
Roscoe,(FN24) and contemporary dictionaries). Regardless of its spelling,
the word berdache has been used in anthropological writings not to imply
that the individuals so labeled were kept boys or male prostitutes, but
to refer to what the writers perceived to be transvestitism, homosexuality,
hermaphrodism, and transgenderism as institutions viewed positively in
Native American and First Nations cultures.(FN25).

It is worth noting that when used in most anthropological writings,
berdache was primarily presented as a positively sanctioned institution
within traditional Native American and First Nations cultures. Those writings
presented pictures of a pan-Native North American gender or sex category
that was allegedly supported in Native communities, in some cases even
revered. This image of a universal Native category has been taught in introductory
and advanced college courses since well before the beginning of the gay
studies movement in the United States. As Ralph Bolton found in his survey
of textbooks, it is a staple in most introductory anthropology, sociology,
psychology, and sexology textbooks.(FN26).

If only the myth were true! Recent work by Lang(FN27) and Trexler(FN28)
documents the opposite case for many tribes: people called berdaches by
anthropologists were not uniformly revered nor uniformly reviled. Some
had important cultural roles and were honored; others were ridiculed and
shamed. The word, in its lack of specificity, confounds traditional gender
and sexual diversity, lumping all together in a category coded social/sexual
deviance by Westerners, but romanticized as a normative "other" in postcolonial
discourse for Native Americans only. The next step, of course, is to code
all Native Americans (and First Nations) peoples as socially deviant (for
further information on this process see Brown(FN29). Many who experienced
homophobia on their reservation left, moving to urban centers where they
could make connections with people of comparable gender and sexual identities
if not of the same racial, ethnic, and class identities. Some of the earlier
writings held out false hope to those who had become "lost gay urban Indians"(FN30)--Native
Americans who did not want to live the "white urban gay life" but sometimes
felt they had no choice if they were to live true to their full persona.(FN31)
The stories circulating in the urban gay communities of the 1970s and 1980s
held up berdache as an icon for people of all races(FN32) to hold onto
in their desperate desire to obtain acceptance and respect. For some Native
gays and lesbians, these stories held a promise of acceptance or even revered
status if only their tribe would return to traditional cultural ways. A
non-Native writer explains:.

It now appears that the 1980's and 1990's overwhelmingly positive, almost
deifying interpretations of the highly respected role that gender variants
played in Native America are problematic because these interpretations
themselves were constructed through various powerful filters-historic and
cultural. Gay writers may have overstated their ethnographic point. The
Navajo case is particularly important because it has been used as a primary
ethnographic example of where the role of the nádleeh, or male-bodied
individual who performs the role of a woman, is one of the most highly
venerated in North America.(FN33).

The fact is that only in some instances were two-spirit people recognized
with a specific linguistic marker; and even rarer (as in Navajo communities
of the past), were such people honored, accepted, and raised to be the
way they are.(FN34) The same holds true for other contemporary two-spirit
people.

IMAGES OF GENDERS AND SEXUALITIES As we begin to unpack
the great diversity of genders in Native North America and the ways in
which sexuality informs performance of gender roles, we are drawn back
to the original definition of berdache. Our research shows that there are
indeed individuals today appropriately called berdache by researchers.
We refer specifically to feminine boys and young males living on reservations
and in urban places, both in Native and non-Native communities, who are
passive sexual consorts of heterosexual and homosexual adult men. The emphasis
in these relationships is sex.

In contrast, in Native communities that teach children that the gendered
persona is more important than the sexed body, feminine boys and young
males will be raised to perform as women in the society.(FN35) As they
mature and begin to assume public roles associated with their sexual status,
they may appear to the outsider more like "male-to-female transgender"
people than homosexual males, because the emphasis of the actor is on performance
of gender roles.(FN36) Thus, young male-bodied persons may be culturally
supported through adolescence until they mature into male-bodied transgendered
adults who could be homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual in sex performance,
erotic response, and/or enduring relationships. Furthermore, in fulfilling
gender role performances, the transgender adult may be more transvestic
than transgender, if his/her own gender identity is situated in a temporary
category used only when fulfilling the public role.(FN37) On the other
hand, a male-bodied individual raised as a woman (who would be expected
to dress accordingly(FN38)) will be encouraged to accommodate the full
range of womanly roles, including engaging in a sexual relationship with
men; one might consider this a homosexual relationship were it not in fact
a heterogender relationship between a woman (who happens to be male-bodied)
and a man (who is also male-bodied).(FN39) By using the concept of gender
as an analytic category, we extend our understanding of human erotic and
sexual bonding beyond essentialist (natural) approaches to sex acts which
emphasize genital couplings, especially male-male homosexuality.(FN40)
As Hawkesworth observes,.

However, attempting to confound the uses of essentialism requires avoiding
crucial pitfalls, particularly those associated with race and ethnicity,
which tend to disappear in conversations about gender categories--even
when discussing two-spirit people.

On some reservations, feminine boys are used sexually by married men.
In studies of male juvenile prostitutes in Seattle, Washington, it is primarily
heterosexual adult males who seek out boys for passive anal and oral sex.(FN42)
In both Seattle and on reservations, such behavior is negatively sanctioned.
It is not glamorous; it is not romantic; it is "sex for survival." These
boys (aged nine to seventeen) are berdaches in the literal, original meaning
of the word: boys used for sexual purposes. The married "heterosexual"
men on reservations who engage in sex with boys(FN43) retain their heterosexual
status; they are never considered to be bisexual or homosexual. In some
urban gay settings, these men are commonly called "Men who have Sex with
Men (MSMs).".

Unlike the term berdache, which has been used as the grab bag of Native
American and First Nations gender and sexual diversity, two-spirit reflects
the range of sexuality and gender identity derived from spiritual contemplation
of one's place on this earth, this contemplation shored up by the teachings
from parents and elders about how to live as a two-spirit person. On some
reservations there is still a cultural script, though much less defined
than what Parsons found in the 1920s, which allows parents and elders to
teach feminine boys that they can embody womanly traits without shame.(FN45)
They also learn that they can become adult male-bodied persons with social
roles and occupations associated with women. Additionally, in some of these
same communities, masculine girls are generally allowed to avoid the reproductive
requirements of their community. As teenagers and adult women, unless they
find others like themselves and want to stay on the reservation, they tend
to stay alone. If they do find another similar female-bodied person, the
two may live together, forming an enduring relationship of mutual support,
caring, and affective expression.

With the experiences or expectations described above, some transgender
children grow up with a strong sense of self-worth and fully participate
in their communities. Others who do not feel comfortable, most likely because
they did not have positive reinforcement of their potential transgender
persona, go to urban areas where they join other gay/lesbian/bisexual/
transgender people in making a new community. On the reservation, a feminine
man may continue to associate with women's roles, though in recent years
this is found less and less in everyday life. For example, on the Navajo
Reservation there are very few roles left for nádleeh, even though
there are at least six nádleeh who are able to fulfill the ceremonial
duties of a male-bodied woman for specific religious events. The scarcity
of traditional nádleeh to fulfill ceremonial roles may lead, as
Hollimon notes for the Yokuts, to women being substituted in the roles.(FN46)
The absence of recognizable and specifically trained transgender people
has led to erasure of the traditional transgender roles and the institutionalization
of intense homophobia on reservations, as gay and lesbian homosexuality
came to be the focus of social attention, marked as social deviance imported
from the white world. Our work is intended to stop the spread of homophobia
and to facilitate the reintegration of two-spirit people (regardless of
gender identity and sexuality) into various Native cultures.

WHAT'S IN A NAME, ANYWAY? In 1993, Doyle Robertson read
the following at the 1993 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting:.

I am not, nor do I want to be, the stereotype of a cross-dressing,
man/woman, sexually anal-passive individual best suited to sewing, beading,
and carrying in wood for the fire on which to cook supper. I am Dakota.

I am Scottish. I am loved. I am different. I am a pizza man. I am
a digger of the sacred stone. I am a faggot. I am special. I am winkte.
I am two-spirit. I am Doyle.(FN47).

As with others who demand the right to self-name, Robertson demonstrates
resistance to being named or characterized by a specific offensive word.

Our research is, in part, about people's need and right to name themselves
and to take positions vis-à-vis social scientific investigations
of their lives. The term two-spirit originally was intended to facilitate
a linguistic distancing of Native American and First Nations gays and lesbians
from non-Native gays and lesbians. As time passed and the use of two-spirit
gained wider acceptance, new definitions were acquired. The current use
of the term is meant to bring clarity to the range of gender diversity
within and across Native American tribes and First Nations, and incorporates
Western notions of sexualities and gender identities.

Our research is intended to help us understand and contribute to the
expanding conversations about the many ways in which people establish their
gendered selves at various points during their lifetime. We are interested
in how sexuality is related to gender, but more importantly in how people
affectively relate their gendered selves to others. This includes the work
roles that people identify with, the relational partnerships they establish,
the domestic and extra-domestic responsibilities they fulfill within their
cultures, and how they imagine themselves overall. We are more interested
in the contemporary statements that people make about themselves than in
the historical renderings that missionaries, travelers, and others have
made about alleged ancestors of modern peoples. Some of those working with
us in this endeavor take different stances in their writing. Some emphasize
terminology, classifications, and categories of gender;(FN48) others focus
on personhood, spirituality, and contextualization within their societies.(FN49)
Goulet combines these approaches.(FN50) Some address homophobia and its
effect on the actualization of the full range of being a person in society.(FN51)
We all know someone who desires to be the revered person described by Jacobs,(FN52)
Callender and Kochems,(FN53) Blackwood,(FN54) Williams,(FN55) and Lang,(FN56)
and others when they write about the kind of social status once held by
winkte, (Lakota), nádleeh (Navajo), kwidó, (Tewa), tainna
wa'ippe (Shoshone), dubuds (Paiute), lhamana (Zuni), and others of times
past who were not called words which mean "woman" or "man" in their respective
societies. Some people come from traditions in which so much power is associated
with and evoked by using a categorical term--for instance, nádleeh,
medicine man, clown--that it is inappropriate to use the term out of cultural
context.(FN57) "Another example is the Siouan term 'heyoka which refers
to a contrary, which is not the same as a 'winkte. "(FN58) On the other
hand, people searching for a meaningful label that ties them to their traditions
may use some historically appropriate term to validate their experiences
as culturally relevant.(FN59) Furthermore, it may be necessary to reject
all association with historical terms and use another culture's gender
categories; for example, an urban Navajo may find it more respectful of
his or her tradition to define himself or herself as a gay male or a lesbian
than to define as a nádleehi. Or this person may seek an intermediary
way by rejecting both gay and lesbian and the traditional term by choosing
the label two-spirit.

WHAT'S LOST? WHAT'S LEFT? MOVING FROM PAST TO FUTURE AND NATIVE (PAN-INDIAN)
SELF-NAMING In 1990s American popular culture, gender bending,
gender blending, and gender changing has increasingly become part of the
public landscape. Through the media--in stories ranging from those about
the movie The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, a film depicting
the adventures of a male-to-female transgender person who travels to Australia's
Outback with two male professional drag queens or transvestites,(FN60)
to those about gay rights and anti-homosexual movements--the general public
watched and engaged in discussions of that experimental moment, as people
stretched and pushed the boundaries of gender markers and categories. A
body of literature now exists, in large part stimulated by the politics
of location, to which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other scholars
have brought their search for scientific understanding of sexual and gender
diversity.(FN61) The studies extend beyond psychological and sociological
normative studies of years past to encompass the vast complexity of human
desire, eroticism, and self-definitions of personhood. Self-naming is part
of this process. It should come as no surprise that Native Americans and
First Nations people have engaged in conversations about these matters
for a long time, although their contributions to the academic discourses
have been largely invisible and, when found, are usually framed by non-Indian
or white writers who have appropriated them: "The assumption that everything
begins and ends with the white version of reality has everything to do
with suppression ... of an Indian viewpoint."(FN62).

In 1992, as a result of our respective experiences in working with Native
Americans, we began exploring the differences between our understanding
of the life experiences of two-spirit friends and the way their lives had
been characterized in anthropological, historical, sociological, and sexology
writings. Many of these writings, including the most recent ethnohistorical
studies,(FN63) are based on European and Euramerican historical accounts
of individuals, statuses, and roles that were alive and functioning decades
ago, one hundred years ago, and sometimes even three hundred years ago.
In the past, tribal cultures and gender traditions were different than
they are now, and the scholar's gaze was framed by Western intellectual
and clerical-philosophical colonial worldviews. We agreed with two-spirit
friends that for too long discussions of Native American and First Nations
gender diversity and sexuality had taken place without benefit of shared
discourse with Native Americans and First Nations people, in spite of the
fact that there had been growing activism as well as research and publications
on this topic since the 1980s.

In Native North America, there were and still are cultures in which
more than two gender categories are marked, and one can find more than
one hundred years of Western academic writing on this subject. By the mid-1990s
studies of Native American and First Nations gender diversity and sexuality
became situated squarely within larger academic and public interests. Paula
Gunn Allen, for example, argues that there have always been homosexuals
(gays and lesbians) within American Indian societies.(FN64) She also refers
to the terms which designate third- and fourth-gender people within select
tribes.(FN65) Subsequently, Roscoe published a list of purported Native
terms for berdaches based on his extensive search of writings from the
early colonial periods to the middle of the twentieth century (1500s to
1940s).(FN66) "Berdache was never used in any Native communities!... I
get irate when I hear Native Americans use the B-word to describe themselves.
The berdache sic concept is not of Native cultures. It gives no meaning
to our histories."(FN67) The original tribal terms for individuals who
live multiple gendered lives, fulfill both women's and men's social roles,
engage in cross-sex dressing with or without also engaging in cross-sex
behavior, are largely lost on reservations today. Some terms have survived
in everyday use, such as the Navajo nádleeh or the Dakota winkte.
But even these terms, as well as others such as the Tewa kwidó,
have only recently been rediscovered and claimed by young gay and lesbian
youth on reservations. These terms are generally understood to function
only as labels; many are used without an understanding of their larger
historical and cultural meanings.(FN68) The roles of individuals living
in transgender or multiple gender statuses varied between and within tribes
over time and circumstance. For example, multiple gendered male-bodied
people of the Tewa world, kwi-sen, are men empowered with maternal characteristics
and as principle elders of the community assume the care of the people
(their "children"). Kwi-sen (woman+man) are "sacred mothers" in their communities;(FN69)
their specialized duties are not public nor are they for public discussion.
At specific ceremonial times (closed to non-Tewa people), they will appear
in the plaza to conduct appropriate calendrical rituals. On the other hand,
there are individuals whose lives approximate those of the previously described
berdaches: young men who are sexual consorts of heterosexual men. Kwidó
is a colloquial Tewa term used to refer to both gay males and berdache
youth, but most young people prefer to use gay or lesbian or no term at
all for their personal/sexual identity. Just as at Navajo Nation, where
the term two-spirit is seldom used (in deference to gay, lesbian, or nádleeh),
the Tewa people do not refer to themselves as two-spirit people on the
reservation.

One reason for the careful use of terminology both on and off the reservation
is the high incidence of homophobia in North America.

Homophobia was taught to us as a component of Western education and
religion. We were presented with an entirely new set of taboos, which did
not correspond to our own models and which focused on sexual behavior rather
than the intricate roles Two-Spirit people played. As a result of this
misrepresentation, our nations no longer accepted us as they once had.
Many Native Americans had to come to terms with their sexuality in urban
settings, separate from our cultures. We had to "come out" in the Western
world. But the journey into the mainstream left many of us lonesome for
our homes.(FN70).

Hope for personal self-determination arises in individual and collective
recognition that by the act of self-naming--in this case choosing Two-Spirit--"
we distance ourselves from colonial words like berdache."(FN71) As Alvin
Josephy, Jr. writes,.

Indians have played a large role by asserting themselves more strongly
than ever before in interpreting to the rest of the world their own heritage
and cultures and in relating their own histories. As partners of non-Indian
scholars, modern day Native American writers, artists, scientists, teachers,
tradition-keepers, and tribal cultural leaders have often joined to illuminate
Indian perspectives of the past, making known and understandable much that
whites, on their own, had not grasped, and on the whole providing a far
greater measure of objectivity and truth to the telling of the Indian's
story.(FN72).

Looking from the past toward the future, and using the model established
by the Navajo Nation (and at Zuni, Hopi and other reservations),(FN73)
formal collaborative endeavors may help shape the outcome and directions
of the continued academic interest in Native American and First Nations
people. Hopefully, many more Native students will become interested in
these academic pursuits because, overwhelmingly, writings on these subjects
continue to be dominated by non-Natives.

CONCLUSION Our work is about the many ways in which people
write their own lives, their gendered selves (multigendered or single-gendered).
We are less interested in how sexuality is related to gender than in how
enduring relationships and formal affective bonding take place within and
across gender categories. As stated above, the new studies by scholars
fluent in the language of original sources written about Native American
sexuality(FN74) reveal a much more complex picture of the place of berdaches
and two-spirit people in contact and current colonial periods. Investigating
the lives of two-spirit people in the contemporary world while engaging
that new scholarship helps to foreground the details of that complexity.

Some additional issues raised in our work result from the conflicts
inherent in conducting anthropology in Native American and First Nations
communities today. Some of the dilemmas this work confronts include: the
right of outsiders to name Native people; the right of outsiders to tell
everything they see when working in Native American and First Nations communities;
and the emerging legal problems associated with the appropriation of intellectual
property. In this last regard, ethnographers are facing new problems when
taking indigenous knowledge without informed consent and without full remuneration,
attribution, and rights of ownership to the information. Other problems
arise from differences in academic, community, or individual research and
methodology, whether one is conducting applied or action research with
a community or an agency. In academia, the "new ethnography" as well as
the various forms of the "New Indian History" foreground "the question
of Indian voice" weighed against the challenge of "whether or not Indian
people own their own past or if it is part of a more general human currency."(FN75)
A blending of voices may be the only way to reduce the confusions facing
health care practitioners and social service workers in both reservation
and urban locales, whether concerned with HIV-AIDS prevention, alcohol
and drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, suicide, or other crises.

Other issues arise from the time frames of our research. Historical
studies of Native American and First Nations sexualities and gender diversity
were framed by the research paradigms of that time and do not generally
allow for empirical or theoretical fit with contemporary Native American
and First Nations lives. This issue is made clear by the observation that.

Jacobs and Farrer have known elder men who appeared to live the "traditional
berdache" roles, as described by Martin and Voorhies (1975:84-107), Allen
(1986), Williams (1986), and Gay American Indians (1988), on their respective
reservations. But, they also both know young men (boys) who have suffered
grievously at the hands and words of people on their reservations, including
relatives. In both instances, however, the boys' aunt and mother (respectively)
have protected their sons and tried to help them through the stages of
ritual development. Homophobia stands firmly in the way for these boys.
Did the elders they knew in the 1970's and 80's go through the terrors
of homophobia when they were boys? Were they "feminine" boys? "girlish"
boys? Or androgynous? How were they socialized to assume an accepted, sometimes
revered status in their communities?(FN76).

We do not have empirical answers to these questions. However, we suspect
intuitively that it is the absence of formal transmission of traditional
knowledge about two-spirit people that has led to increased incidences
of homophobia on reservations with cultures that traditionally used multiple
gender categories and roles. The research continues as we seek to separate
legend, mythology, and the experiences of Native American and First Nations
people living today.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank the following individuals and
institutions for support of our work: Sydel Silverman, president of the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the University of
Washington Royalty Research Fund, Graduate School, and Women Studies Department;
the American Indian Graduate Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft; and a generous grant to support completion of our
book from Arnold Pilling. Special thanks to University of Illinois Press
for allowing portions of Two-Spirit People and Steps Toward an Anthropology
of Homosexuality to be republished here; to Dr. Bea Medicine for reading
and commenting on this paper, and to anonymous reviewers for their comments
and suggestions made on a previous, draft version of the paper.

Although she could not participate in the development of this particular
paper, our work with Dr. Sabine Lang during the course of six years continues
to inform our understanding of the issues we describe herein. We remain
grateful for shared collaborative experiences, opportunities, research,
and wisdom.

Wesley Thomas (Navajo) earned his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at
the University of Washington and is a regular consultant on traditional
Navajo cultural elements. Sue-Ellen Jacobs is professor of women studies
and adjunct professor of anthropology and music at the University of Washington.
With Thomas, she coedited Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity,
Sexuality, and Spirituality.

FOOTNOTES1. A briefer version of this paper, entitled "Representations
of Native North American Gender Identities and Sexualities" by Jacobs,
Thomas, and Lang, appears in Steps Toward an Anthropology of Homosexuality,
ed. Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1999).

5. My life involves gender changes. For example, I consider myself,
and am considered by traditional Navajo people within the Navajo Nation,
as a nádleeh, especially when I am dancing in the Night Way Chant
during the winter seasons. I maintain this specific gender identity and
status throughout the ceremonial period. At the conclusion of the ceremony,
and when I return to Seattle, that identity is replaced with an urban "gay"
identity. I readjust myself to my surrounding environments and continue
on with my life as a person. Now and then, when I am on other (non-Navajo)
reservations, I identify, and more importantly am identified as, a two-spirit
person (WT).

6. Richard C. Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political
Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1995), 3-101.

7. Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North
America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

8. Trexler, op.cit., 105.

9. Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American
Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, republished in 1991, with a
new author's preface), 233-234.

14. Charles Callender and Lee M. Kochems, "The North American Berdache,"
Current Anthropology 24 (1983): 443-456.

15. Williams, op. cit.

16. Gay American Indians (with Will Roscoe), Living the Spirit: A Gay
American Indian Anthology (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).

17. Written in the 1700s; English translation and editing by Reuben
Gold Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (New York: Pageant,
1959).

18. Jacobs, 1968, loc. cit.

19. Williams, op. cit., 9.

20. Jacobs, op. cit.

21. Angelino and Shedd, "A Note on Berdache," 121-122.

22. Will Roscoe, "Frontier Terms for Two-Spirits," table found in "'Was
We'wha a Homosexual? : Native American Survivance and the Two-Spirit Tradition,"
Paper read by Mildred Dickemann in the session, "Revisiting the 'North
American Berdache Empirically and Theoretically" at the 92nd Annual Meeting
of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, mss., 1993.

27. Sabine Lang, Men as Women -- Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native
American Cultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); and Visions
and Choices: Native American Two-Spirited Peoples' Lives (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1999).

28. Trexler, op. cit.

29. Brown, op. cit. In 1998 further efforts to demonize Native American
tribes in the United States take the form of language being used by supporters
of Senator Slade Gorton's call for the end to tribal sovereignty; see,
for example, Lynda V. Mapes, "Backlash for Tribal Immunity," Seattle Times,
April 5, 1998, B1, B2, and various "Letters to the Editor" of the same
date.

32. For example, we know of several gay Native American organizations
and one support group for non-Native transsexuals and transvestites who
called themselves the "Berdache Society." For further information, see
Anne Bolin, In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage (New York: Bergin
and Garvey, 1988), xi, 2, et passim.

33. Bruce Pierini, "The Gendered Body: Sex and Gender Constructions
in Navajo," MGW - Mom... Guess What! Newspaper 20:334 (Sacramento, CA,
1998): 12, 16. In fact, the nádleeh role is so venerated that traditional
tribal elders have requested that it not be discussed outside of Navajo
language contexts; Wesley Thomas interviewed by Pierini in "The Gendered
Body: Sex and Gender Constructions in Navajo," 16.

34. For an important study of evidence of horrific persecution of berdaches,
see Trexler, op. cit.

35. For example, see Sandra E. Hollimon, "The Third Gender in Native
California: Two-Spirit Undertakers Among the Chumash and Their Neighbors,"
in Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica, ed. Cheryl Claassen
and Rosemary A. Joyce (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1997), 173-188.

36. Here we follow Kessler and McKenna in our use of "actor" and "performance
of gender roles." Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological
Approach (New York: Wiley, 1978).

37. See for example: (1) Hollimon's discussion of Yokut buriers, where
the literature indicates that tono'cim range from being male-bodied people
who feel a "calling" to assume this role, to women with children who inherit
their roles as undertakers through their mother's lineage and who may pass
their title to daughters (ibid., 179); (2) discussions about the various
identities and roles Wewha held during her/his lifetime (Arnold Pilling,
"Cross-Dressing and Shamanism Among Selected Western North American Tribes,"
in Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality and Spirituality,
69-99; Will Roscoe, "The Zuni-Man Woman," Outlook 4 (1988): 56-67; (3)
Ortiz's mention of Pueblo men's transvestic ridicule of women and Pueblo
women's transvestic ridicule of men in public ceremonials. Alfonso Ortiz,
The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969), 169-170n; and (4) Parsons description
of a Tewa ceremony in which.

w omen dress as men, and men as women, some of them making up as pregnant
women, and these sing, "some of these boys made me pregnant." The men in
masquerade do women's work, fetching water, baking bread outdoors in the
oven on street or roof, and carrying dinner to the dancers. The masqueraders
with cloths in their hands to clean the ovens go from door to door and
sing, "I am scared, let's run away!" People give them bread. "You are lazy.
You don't bring us wood, you don't hunt deer, you bring nothing to us,"
men say to the women. In the dance, women sing for the men, taunting songs
referring to such things as earrings of cotton, full of lice. Other women
carry a basket of bread on their head and say, "My pare (elder brother
or sister) is dancing and I throw this bread." They throw other things
too, "corn, dishes, everything." According to Santa Clara tale, this ceremony
was danced after the return of the warrior women bring back scalps....
The ceremony is for fertility, to have a good year in crops, children,
horses, and cattle.

38. "If beyond a dual sexual division of labor , should a man take women's
work, he is expected to wear women's clothes and conform in general to
women's ways. Mannish women do not become transvestites. I have known only
two: Nancy of Zuni, who like a male transvestite is an expert builder of
fireplaces and dances kachina, and Mrs. Chavez of Isleta who is an independent
traveler and trader and a member of the war society" (ibid., 38n.). See
Pilling, op. cit., 73-74, for an alternative view of nancy.

39. For a contrasting view, see Will Roscoe, "Was We'Wha a Homosexual?"
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2 (1995): 193-235.

43. We are not referring to all intergenerational male-to-male relationships,
but only to exploitative pedophilia, which falls in the legal domain of
child abuse: the "children" are not of legal sexual consent age. We are
also not describing or referring to relationships that teenage boys have
with older men as they are discovering and testing their homosexuality;
that is the subject of another paper.

50. Jean-Guy Goulet, "The Northern Athapaskan 'Berdache Reconsidered:
On Reading More Than There Is in the Ethnographic Record," in Two-Spirit
People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality, 45-68.

60. Since Priscilla, Patrick Swayze played the lead drag queen in To
Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything, Julie Neumar, Robin Williams played the
"butch" partner in a gay couple in Bird Cage (a successful remake of the
highly acclaimed La Cage aux Folles), and the sitcom Ellen began exploring
various aspects of lesbian life through its main character, played by comedian
Ellen Degeneres. In addition, M. Butterfly (the widely heralded story of
an Asian male-bodied transgender person long married to a British diplomat
who did not realize his wife was not female-bodied), had several years
run on Broadway, receiving laudatory reviews comparable to those enjoyed
by the light opera, Madame Butterfly. All of these new works have been
critically reviewed in cultural studies literature as evidence of a society
pushing the border of fixed gender categories, irrespective of sexuality.

61. In our work, we use the term gender to refer specifically to cultural
rules, ideologies, and expected behaviors for individuals of diverse phenotypes
and psychosocial characteristics. Gender identities refers to peoples'
own locations within a range of gender identity possibilities defined by
their respective cultures. We restrict our use of sex to biological phenotypes
and to sexual behaviors; we use sexualities for the range of sex behaviors
called homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality, trisexuality, and others.
Sexual and gender diversity refers to the range of possible sexualities
and genders marked (linguistically and otherwise) within and across diverse
cultures.

65. See especially the chapter entitled "How the West Was Really Won,"
in Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American
Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 194-208.

66. Will Roscoe, "Bibliography of Berdache and Alternative Gender Roles
among North American Indians," Journal of Homosexuality 14 (1987): 81-171.